October 17, 2013
10:00 AM (EDT)

News Release Number: STScI-2013-48

October 17, 2013: An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational
lens yet a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of
relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object.
The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a
distant galaxy. The observation also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should
be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have
been phenomenally lucky or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially
the number of small, very young galaxies in the early universe.